Tenderfoot

Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960s. His first Carcanet collection, Ethiopia Boy (Carcanet/Oxford Poets, 2013), was described by Julian Stannard in Poetry Review as 'a series of dazzling vignettes... a love letter to the country and his childhood friend, Abebe'. His translations of contemporary Ethiopian poets have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, The Missing Slate and Asymptote Journal. With Alemu Tebeje, he translated and edited Songs We Learn from Trees, the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry in English, published by Carcanet in May 2020. Sketches from the Poem Road (after Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North), a collaboration with his partner, the Japanese painter and sculptor Isao Miura, was published by Hagi Press in 2015 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. He is a trustee of the Anglo-Ethiopian Society and the Poetry Society.

'These poems are utterly distinctive, there is something at once proud and sad in them, as the reader senses that Tenderfoot loves but stands outside what he loves.' - Sasha Dugdale; 'Chris Beckett's poetry is highly original [...] The language is always fresh and surprising' - Daljit Nagra